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April 9, 1999/23 Nisan 5759, Vol. 51, No. 28
Compelling legacyEditorialThings that every person should see. So Robert Friedlander's father described the chilling images his son was viewing on a visit to Nazi death camps in Poland, recounted in a story this week about Friedlander's recent trip (page 10).Things that every person should see. So Avi Pazner, a Holocaust survivor and Israeli diplomat, might speak of his visit to an Albanian refugee camp, where he encountered images much like those he remembered from his own experiences more than 50 years ago. The comparison between the Shoah and the persecution of ethnic Albanians is all too obvious. The world press has appropriated the grisly vocabulary - genocide, ethnic cleansing - and horrific images - crowded rail cars, teeming refugee camps, growing lists of missing family members - in reporting the suffering of a people afflicted solely because of their national identity. In doing so, journalists have tied the tragedy of Kosovo to its historic precedents and imbued the Shoah with a telling immediacy. Friedlander, like other perceptive and caring young adults, is looking back to understand the heritage of the Jewish past. Pazner, Israel's first ambassador to Albania, is looking forward in search of a more hopeful future. That prospect becomes more likely given the actions of nations such as Israel, which, with the support of the American Jewish community, is airlifting planeloads of relief supplies and workers to the region; and by Albania's neighboring Jewish communities, who are helping to transport refugees out of harm's way. This act of international communal responsibility is especially heartening in a locale in which Jewish communities were either destroyed by the Nazis or decimated by the Communists. It evokes the essence of the lesson of the Shoah: to speak out and to act. As we recall the Holocaust on Yom Hashoah, this year on April 13, we will pray also for peace in Kosovo, consoled with the knowledge that from the ashes of Auschwitz and Birkenau, a strong Israel and a committed worldwide Jewish community have been reborn. |
